Sentimentality
by Juliana Brandagamba
Summary: [ONESHOT] Sherlock has just moved in to 221B, and Mycroft has come to visit. An exploration of the brothers' childhood and relationship, based on items around the flat.


Mycroft was at the end of his tether.

He knew Sherlock wasn't on a case. He knew he wasn't even busy. He was just out. Out, at the very time that Mycroft had said he would be coming round. He had done that last time. Pretended to be occupied until he was sure that Mycroft had given up and gone home.

Typical little brother.

He had been admitted to 221 Baker Street by a flustered landlady – Mrs Hudson – whom he did not know, but whom he guessed to be less innocent than she looked, clever, bubbly and addicted to tea. She was nice enough, he supposed, if you were normal. He had been shown up the stairs and told to wait on the landing – even Mrs Hudson had been convinced that Sherlock would be back soon.

Ha. Not likely.

He dithered on the landing for precisely five and a half seconds before picking the lock on the door to 221B and entering.

It was a nice place Sherlock had got himself, he had to admit. He wondered why he hadn't thought of going halves with someone on a flat. The word _misanthrope_ sprang to mind, but he ignored it.

It was already filled with things, and everywhere there were signs that two very different people lived here. It looked very much like somewhere Sherlock inhabited, but smelled much better than his last flat – a mixture of milky tea and pure and simple cleanliness. He closed the door behind him, and, with nothing better to do, began to browse. He had never been allowed to look around Sherlock's last flat properly for some reason that probably concerned drugs, and he found himself overly curious as to his brother's private life.

They had never really got on, nor even shared in each other's company much. Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes could easily have been unrelated, except for that slight resemblance in appearance that both always cursed. Mycroft could deduce things like his brother, and knew a lot of things that Sherlock would rather he didn't know, but the questions were overwhelming.

 _Should I know my brother better than I do?_ was the first and foremost of these questions.

He began to browse, starting with the mantelpiece. The mantelpiece is, though it is against a wall, the centrepiece of the room – the place where one puts those things that one is most proud of.

There was a skull on it.

He lifted it down, staring into the blank eye-sockets slightly incredulously. _Male. European. Late twenties or early thirties... like Sherlock._ The sudden grisly thought that it could have been Sherlock's skull made him replace it hurriedly. A few times – too many times – in his childhood he had wished his brother dead. But no matter how serious he had sounded, he had never wanted it, and now, looking at that skull that so reminded him of Sherlock... Who did Sherlock think it looked like, though? Mycroft? Himself?...

He swallowed, an unnatural revulsion turning his eyes away from the skull and to the other items on the mantelpiece. A reading-lamp. The one Sherlock had had since he went to university. Given that the mantelpiece was nowhere near a plug-socket, he guessed that the lamp no longer worked, and that it was Sherlock's strange idea of an ornament, or perhaps a souvenir.

A selection of mounted creatures. Moths, beetles – was that a bat? The result of Sherlock's brief but absorbing childhood interest in the anatomy of anything and everything he could find. Anything he could find that was dead, anyway. Sherlock had never liked killing things. Mycroft had laughed at him for being incapable of swatting a fly with a newspaper – "But it's not harming you! And anyway, Mummy will get angry at me for getting fly guts on the stove". He made a point of killing things only in self-defence. Not that Mycroft was given to pointless slaughter, but...

There among the beetles he recognised a cockchafer that Sherlock, aged just six, had tried to raise as a pet. Redbeard had tried to eat it, and the intact nature of the remains mounted here were testament to Sherlock's desperate attempts to try to rescue his beloved "Redbug" from the jaws of his equally beloved dog.

Though he would never in a million years admit it, Sherlock had always been really rather sentimental. A little too sentimental, perhaps...

He shuffled sideways to inspect the bookshelves. Sherlock hoarded books, and almost never read them. He always justified it by saying that they would be useful for reference one day – you never knew what sort of odd things could crop up on a case.

Some of these books were evidently John's. War novels, spy novels, a certain number of slightly trashy murder mysteries that were certainly not Sherlock's. (Sherlock refused to read murder mysteries, or at the least usually solved them by page three, and declared them to be boring. He particularly hated Hercule Poirot, who always declared physical clues to be superficial in solving a mystery, and said that psychology was always of the utmost importance – a claim that Sherlock thought utterly ridiculous.) But there was a wide array of reference books, non-fiction books, a couple of fiction books that were more of a bookshelf staple than something he would actually read – _Great Expectations_ , _The Lord of the Rings_ , _To Kill a Mockingbird_. Classics that he had managed to acquire over the course of his life. Then there were chemistry textbooks – a few of which belonged to their secondary school: Mycroft looked inside one of the covers to find Sherlock's name as the last in a list of more responsible students. He was slightly surprised to find that he had at one point used the book – surprised partly because of the coincidence, and partly because he couldn't really remember studying Chemistry. It was a long time ago now.

One of the shelves was devoted to relics, clutter, the stuff that you accumulate and can't get rid of – or at the least, those things that most people want to keep. Mycroft didn't really do sentimentality. He knelt to the level of the shelf, and inspected the line of items: an Airfix plane (Sherlock had been forced to make that one summer after he received the kit for his birthday); a first-edition _Famous Five_ mystery, which Sherlock had never read but which he treasured because their late grandfather's name was written inside; a certificate – Sherlock's chemistry prize from Speech Day, which he had been prouder to receive than he had ever let on (Mycroft had won the History and French prizes, and had been voted, in a less formal ceremony, Most Likely To Become Famous, on top of being Head Boy, and so such awards – which he had furthermore rather expected – weren't all that special to him; but Sherlock, who had been astonished that he had received this one prize, treasured it); and a small stack of photographs, the top one of which was one of Mycroft in chorister's dress. He wrinkled his nose in disgust and stood (cursing the slight pain in his back that he normally tried to pretend didn't exist), and, with no sign of Sherlock still, he continued to the desk halfway across the room.

Sherlock's laptop was closed and holding down a haphazard stack of papers – case notes, newspaper articles, nothing Mycroft didn't know about. A newer desk-lamp was next to it. The rest of the desk was covered with sheets of paper; at the edge was a corner that John had evidently decided to make his own, because it was occupied by a laptop-case with his name on it. Allowing him a square foot of desk was a great kindness and sacrifice coming from Sherlock.

Placed precariously on top of a stack of paper was Sherlock's violin, out of its case, and topped by his bow. Mycroft reached for it, picked it up. He had never been allowed to touch it. It was a beautiful instrument – a genuine Stradivarius. He remembered Sherlock returning from Italy – a school trip for Latin, which he had gone on more to get out of lessons than out of any actual interest in Latin – and bringing with him the instrument, which he had, miraculously, found in a dusty old antiques shop owned by a man who evidently didn't realise that the instrument had been made by Stradivari himself, and was immensely valuable, as Sherlock had confirmed back in England, but had not wanted to make known. He didn't care about the price – Mycroft would have sold a find like that straight away – merely the quality of the instrument, and this one was _good_. In the absence of Sherlock, Mycroft decided he would test it out for himself; and so he raised it to his shoulder and ran through a couple of scales.

Good God, it was a long time since he had last played the violin. His fingering was clumsy, his memory of the scales worse, but this violin! It sang, it created the most wonderful sound, it was just spectacular. Stradivari was an absolute genius, and Sherlock one very, very lucky man.

He had for the most part forgotten the pieces he had learnt so long ago, and so, after a rendition of a snippet of the Four Seasons and the first few bars of Mendelssohn's violin-concerto he put down the violin, not back where it had been but in its case, where it was safer.

Then, feeling just slightly guilty, he pulled open the top drawer of the desk, finding it to be full of stationery (mostly laggy bands and paperclips, but there was also an expensive fountain pen that Mycroft, in a rare moment of generosity, had given his brother for his eighteenth birthday – perhaps as a consolation for accidentally ruining his birthday the year before).

He then tentatively opened the bottom drawer – the lesser-used drawer, the resting-place for more clutter, those things that one holds close to one but rarely feels the need to see. It was rather disorganised – like Sherlock had had all of these objects in a bag, and then, on moving in, had just poured them into the drawer without really looking.

There was a little matchbox filled with stamps, a Victorian coin that Sherlock had found in the garden after Redbeard had been digging there, a tiny little teddy bear that Mycroft remembered Sherlock being rather attached to, a little diary from 1989 that Mycroft had the decency not to read, and, underneath a further collection of oddities, Mycroft saw the corner of a gilded photograph frame – properly gilded, not just painted, he realised with a low whistle. What would it be? A school photograph? The one his parents had taken on his graduation? No, that one had been deeply embarrassing. Mycroft vaguely recalled Sherlock saying something about throwing it in the fire.

He slipped his hand into the depths of the drawer and pulled out the photograph.

And blinked.

It was from his last year at prep school, when Sherlock had still been in primary school. Mycroft was wearing the uniform he had been so proud of even though it was uncomfortable, a little corpulent already, stretched out on the lawn in the garden, his chin on his hands, smiling a proper smile – the sort of smile he hadn't quite managed ever since. Next to him lay Sherlock, grinning childishly, one of his two front teeth missing (the tooth he had then proceeded to subject to death by junior chemistry set), looking remarkably like he did now, with those piercing blue eyes staring directly at the camera, and the wind pulling those irresponsible curls into an untameable flying sprout.

And between the boys sat Redbeard, pawing a little at something in front of him, his tongue hanging out and a small drop of spittle midway to the ground.

Mycroft stared at the photograph. He remembered it being taken. Sherlock had been five or six then, and the brothers had actually got on, because Sherlock hadn't been old enough for jealousy. He had been sweet and innocent – or as sweet and innocent as it is possible for Sherlock to be. They had spent that summer – a glorious summer – playing in the garden, tossing balls for Redbeard and playing pirates or cowboys or Doctor Who or whatever. (Mycroft had always insisted on being the Doctor, leaving Sherlock as the companion; in the early days he had let Sherlock be a male companion, but later on their games had fallen apart when Mycroft had decided that the companion ought to be female, and, more specifically, feeble and prone to screaming. They had given up altogether when Mycroft had tried to force Sherlock into a dress.)

One day that summer their father had come outside and wanted a photograph of them, and so he had taken this one, of which he had had three copies printed: the first was in a Holmes family album somewhere, his own copy had been lost a long time ago, and the third was here. In a frame decorated with actual gold leaf, and packed in with Sherlock's most treasured childhood possessions.

'Curious, isn't it?' said a soft voice from the other side of the room.

Mycroft jumped. He had been so lost in thought that he hadn't noticed Sherlock enter. Hurriedly he made to put the photograph down and close the drawer.

'I was just admiring your flat,' he said drily. 'You have done well.'

'Indeed...'

Sherlock came over and took hold of the drawer before Mycroft could close it fully. He picked up the photograph and studied it a moment, and his eyes were almost laughing as he looked back at Mycroft, as if seeing for the first time how much his brother had changed – and how much he himself hadn't. His brother had grown up; he had retained the curiosity and outer naïveté of a child, as well as that hairstyle that he had never managed to alter. Yet so much more had changed since this photograph had been taken. Redbeard was, of course, gone. Sherlock had a full set of teeth. Mycroft was much taller and rather stouter. And each of them was now incapable of smiling like that in the other's company.

'I wonder what happened?' murmured Sherlock with a hollow chuckle, and he put the photograph back in the drawer and closed it. Then, with a sideways glance at his brother, 'Why don't we get on, Mycroft?'

'Perhaps because I break into your flat when you're out and rifle through your things?' suggested Mycroft, deadpan.

'Perhaps,' considered Sherlock.

'Anyway, who is to say that we still don't get on?'

Their eyes met. Mycroft felt his cheeks redden slightly. Sherlock looked uncomfortable, as he always did when conversations started to get deep.

'We would not be friends if we were not brothers; we have always fought, been jealous of each other...' Sherlock was suddenly conscious of his use of the word _always_ , and his eyes went unconsciously to the drawer.

'And yet I still... care... for you,' said Mycroft with some difficulty, but perfectly honestly.

He swallowed and did not go on. Sherlock's eyes twinkled a little.

Then Mycroft, becoming awkward, coughed a little and held out his hand. 'Welcome to London, dear brother.'

Sherlock shook warmly; and then without warning, two identical smiles spread across the brothers' faces – smiles that had for so long sat gathering dust in Sherlock's desk drawer, smiles that Mycroft had, admittedly, entirely forgotten until now.

Perhaps sentimentality wasn't such a bad thing after all...


End file.
